Has the climate propaganda reached a point where radical climatism is leading us into dangerous negligence?
The severe winter in the northern hemisphere has been widely recorded. However, key climate information providers have altered data. The result — intended or not — has been to make the recent record lows of the winter appear normal.
November 2017 marked the onset of a very cold winter across the Northern Hemisphere. Many parts of North America and Eurasia registered record lows, breaking even 80-year records.
Below-average temperatures continued well into February, breaking records in Japan and Europe. In fact, Europe is about to experience a deep freeze due to changes in local weather patterns.
This has been accompanied by a massive drop in atmospheric temperatures across the tropics, caused by the La Niña (cooling of the tropical Pacific, which in turn cools air that circulates globally) that developed towards the end of 2017.
January of this year recorded the third highest temperature drop in the 470-month satellite record. La Niña will likely draw global temperature back down from the brief record high of late 2015 to early 2017 driven by an unusually strong El Niño.
However, the public has been misinformed because of changes to key temperature data by climate information disseminators like America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The result — again, intended or not — has been the appearance of an exaggerated warming trend.
One example is the data used to construct an average temperature for the Northeast United States. Paul Homewood, a respected scholar on the analysis of long-term climate statistics, shows that raw data recorded by local stations vary by as much as 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit from NOAA’s final adjusted “data,” which hide this winter’s severity, making it seem similar to the recent El Niño-driven highs.
Further, evidence suggests that there has been no significant increase in global average temperature during the past two decades. This sobering reality was even acknowledged by leading climate alarmists.
NOAA’s actions have further tarnished climate science research, which has been plagued in the past by numerous data alterations not only by NOAA but also by similar national agencies in Australia, Europe, and elsewhere, and by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The dangers of altering data go beyond undermining public faith in climate scientists.
A spurious warming trend will result in misplaced priorities. Careless changes to the real-time weather patterns will render local administrations and communities underprepared, deciding between life and death for people who live in areas prone to extreme winters.
More shockingly, worldwide policies based on these fake warming trends divert trillions of dollars from essential development projects — providing electricity, industrialization, pure drinking water, sewage sanitation, infectious disease control, and nutrition supplements to the billions who need them — to the fight against imaginary temperatures. The result? Billions of lives shortened through ongoing hunger and disease.
Despite the evidence for a stable temperature trend, the climate alarmists continue to propagate their agenda through political institutions and mainstream media. If they’re unchecked, our entire economy, industry, and institutions will be restructured to prevent non-existent, or at most non-dangerous, human-driven warming. It will take decades for civilization to recover.
For example, a large scale mandatory transition from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuel-based energy to expensive, unreliable, intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar will raise energy prices, devastating the poor and making rest of the world vulnerable to energy shortages. Even the non-poor will likely suffer from rolling blackouts due to the low and unpredictable supply of renewable energy.
Moreover, finance needed for important development will be diverted to fight the non-existent dangers of the imaginary extreme manmade global warming. The waste has already begun as nations attempt to fulfil their pledges under the Paris climate agreement.
Local administrations globally should resist what Rupert Darwall aptly calls the Green Tyranny imposed by the climate brigade and implement an independent approach to tackle the real challenges facing a world still overcoming poverty.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Coimbatore, India.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
